People can start to control their eating habits and get benefits without consulting a doctor.
Not the sort of people who need to be told to control their eating habits, though. The same reactionary mind that looks at power lines too far away to detect without eyes or a camera as a threat will take an advice to "eat less meat and more vegetables" as a reason to toss their (and their family's) perfectly healthy balanced diet and become never-cooking vegans.
You're right, though. There are other folk who can advise you on making a healthy diet. The FDA is probably a good place to start, and absent them a licensed dietician or even a grocer or high school health teacher.
4 GB is half the size of some folk's entire hard drive. It should be more than enough to back up your entire OS, possibly your entire "bin" directory if you keep your PC neat.
But you're right. A more serious/lazy/gadget-happy geek would be better served buying either a 200 GB portable HDD or a tape backup system in addition to the DVD burner. Both of the previous have the problem in that they simply don't work for offline data archival--it's not their intended purpose.
7. Trade the VW Beetle (or other bad-in-a-crash car) for a Volvo (or other good-safety-record-for-its-driver vehicle).
Ok, where exactly did you here that the Beetle is bad in a crash? Since when is Four stars considered "bad"?
And let's not forget that (1) crash avoidance is more important than trying to be a "bubble", and if we're going to toss around marketroid allegations as truth I'd rather a distinctive (i.e., visible) beetle over a "safe" volvo, or (2) the more important measure of a "by the numbers" car is (fuel and non-fuel) economy, and both cars have a fair bit of credibility in that status. (To say nothing of the rather significant non-fuel economies you get with a slightly used or american-made car.)
Anyway...
This is the Ask Slashdot section. It's where someone asks a question, and they get an answer. In fact, this is a great question for Ask Slashdot, because there were already two great responses ("build a faraday cage" and "get a meter to test") already. It's the equivalent of a "letters to the editor" page, if you really want to stretch a newspaper paradigm to fit/.
(And I'd change your "eat less meat / more vegetables" to a much more intelligent "see your doctor, ask him for diet advice, and follow it" line. Eating no meat and nothing but raw vegtebles is bad for you in entirely different ways than the inverse, but it's still bad for you.)
Your solution is to move things off of a hard drive. Correct. But you don't need a long-term professional solution--especially not when there's a long-term (or, if you want to be anal, medium-term) archival technology already tasked for the home.
Spend $100 and get yourself a DVD burner. Don't just use it for backup, but actually move things that you don't reference all the time--ESPECIALLY those ISOs you almost certainly don't need live--off of the live storage. For things that are important / irreplacable, make several copies. Distribute them far and wide to friends and family if you want.
Either way, though, this marks the end of Palm. I've never seen a company thats managed to 'cooperate' and 'codevelop' with MS without getting really messed
Apple: One of the Mac's biggest and most popular software programs is Microsoft Office. MS even went so far as to bail out Apple in the mid 1990s.
Adobe: Ever notice how Adobe works so well with MS Office? Indesign reads DOCs, Acrobat installs a custom Office PDF writer, etc. All due to cooperation between the two giants.
Essentially Palm is going down (stock wise and tech wise). With Linux Zaurses becoming popular and new products like the Nokia 770 coming out, there's not much room between Linux and WinCE for Palm to build a niche market.
You speak as if the next Palm OS wasn't already going to be linux.
Rumors about a WinCE Treo have been flying around for months. Rumors about a "windows Palm" have been even longer-lived. And, you know what? It isn't going to do jack against PalmOS. All it does it let a very well-designed device (the Treo) compete in just another area.
In the last few months I did my biannual palm upgrade. In two years, when I expect to do it again, the devices will have a Linux core, and they will have the Palm UI. WindowsCE (or whatever the heck the call it) will likely be an option, just as it would be an option to install Windows Vista or Linux on my 2007 iBook.
Both. If you want, substitute "meme" or "change" for "idea."
I'm not surprised at all to learn that there was on-the-fly spell checking far earlier than 1995. It doesn't do a thing to counter my point though, because for some reason neither WordStar nor Wordperfect nor any major other word-processor adopted it until MS did.
I started with Z-DOS (Zenith) which was a licenced version of MS-DOS 1.0 built for the Z100. I read computer rags, etc. I KNOW that much of the stuff attributed to MS actually was pioneered elsewhere, as I watched the whole PC industry unfold. But you cannot convince anyone of that.
Here's the rub--it doesn't matter who came up with the idea first. It matters who adopted it first. Of all the industry players who made office software, Microsoft was the one who was least scared of change--and, thus, they're the one left standing today.
Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Remember that "innovation" and "invention" are not synonyms.
OOo has a few rather interesting features that MS Office doesn't. Word-prediction, XML file formats (that is, "really small files you can actually open and muck around in if you want to"), and a better mix of "help" and "let you do it." Not to mention more than a few I'm just thinking of at 8:30 am.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
That would be Microsoft. Most new ideas in these areas in the last few years are a result of Microsoft taking them up. On-the-fly spell checking? MS Office. Thinking that office programs should export HTML? MS Office. One of the reasons why they break so many standards is that they're always looking for a new whiz-bang feature to get folk to upgrade their office suite. (And yes, a good portion of these ideas were thought up by someone else first. Just like someone else invented the telephone before Bell.)
The new Office has some interesting bits in it--but you are right, and there is a heck of a lot of room for improvement.
Others that most of the users think will be tough to convert will actually convert quite well, because 99% of Word users do not use styles, really know much about using fieldcodes or embed/link to parts of other Office documents via OLE...
Field Codes, OLE, and the like aren't the hard parts. WPDs latter than the version MS thinks it supports, ten-hour-single-page documents (that are just filled with crap formatting), and the like are what really throws it.
And styles--boy, users using custom styles is the LEAST difficult hiccup to deal with!
As for #2 being a red herring--the changes in a version upgrade of office are negilgble between the difference betwixt two unfriendly office software packages.
(And as for your MDB rule of thumb--the correct first question is "What data?" Glorified address books don't need a full server DB, for example. There are others.)
Just because you have "nuclear capabilities" does not mean that you possess the capability needed to wipe out the US.
You seem to misunderstand the threat.
The only way to protect ALL of the United States is to, well, value all of it. Any country that sends a nuclear attack against the United States--possibly even little mini-USAs, such as an embassy or overseas base--is likely to suffer an inkind-plus-n reprisal.
This is YAD, not MAD. As in, "Your Assured Destruction." Watch as North Korea tries to start WWIII, and only succeeds in becoming the next Hiroshima.
1: Microsoft Word can do much the same thing. No, really. Go to a place with a bunch of files that MS can open, install the latest version of Office, and look in the templates & wizards.
2: The price of conversion is in the checking. It's trivial to convert a file from one format to another. It's non-trivial to check both files to ensure that no information was lost.
Anyone who has watched one episode too many of those bad or mediocre TV shows and movies churned out by the industrial machine, at one time or another, must have thought that the home movies made by his cousin, as amateurish as they are, still beat those glossy images produced by a group of people who are in it for the money.
Here's the big secret that all of us whiney creative-but-poor types don't like to point out.
Most of the big talent in hollywood was a crappy kid with a videocamera once too. And the big ones are still there because, well, they make things worth watching.
Sheesh. Yes, 90% of TV is crap. 90% of everything is crap. But that 10% is certainly worth paying for--it's just a matter of price.
Which is kind of like saying that intelligent design has nothing to do with Christianity.
Both statements are technically correct and practically wrong. Christians are among the proponents of intelligent design (and among its detractors, too--there are a hell of a lot of us). And while there are doubtless a few Atheists among the ID proponents, Atheism as a movement (such as it is) is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is that numerous atheists, in their way of preaching without admiting that they're preacing, comingle both halves of the Theory of Evolution and oppose any attempt to rationally seperate them.
A dramatic minority of religions in the world have a problem with the idea that life evolves. Most have no problems at all with the idea that cats and dogs might one day walk around and talk in English, or that they might someday become one single species we'd call "Pet" or four species we could call "do", "dg", "ca", and "ct".
But most religions have a problem when science tries to tell them that Brhama did not create the world, that God did not shape the heavens and the earth, or that Goddess did not give brith to all living things. And they're quite right to.
All true agnostics are atheists and so was Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russell coined the term "agnostic" because he was sick to death of Atheists who treated Atheism as a religion of no God. And so, the language evolved, and the lower-a atheists ceeded the anti-theism word to the capital-A Atheists.
You of course are free to use whatever terms you wish. But the common usage does force a meaning upon "Atheism" of "the belief that there is no God and no group of lesser gods."
the notion of facts and truths don't have a place in science
Science is all about finding truths and facts! Science is all about finding truths and facts! Science is all about finding truths and facts!
It's the whole point of the scientific method--to seperate what we Know from what we Think. Yes, we have to Think it before we can Know it, and so Theory is a vital part of Science--but thinking that we can never and will never move Theories to Laws is just bad science.
Bad science of a kind, btw, that WILL turn science into Atheism. Thankfully, scientists are bright folk, and by and large can seperate the two.
Of course:
give me agnosticism any day.
Exactly right. Spot-on. Yay!
The only religion that science should be even commenting on is secular agnosticism. We *don't* know if a burning bush spoke to Moses thousands of years ago or not. We don't even know what I had for breakfast on this day ten years ago.
Those of us of whatever religon should not be trying to use Science to disprove other religions. And a fair portion of capital-A atheists *do* try and do just that. The bastards.
Kindly name me a theory from Newton's time that is still a theory.
Theories DO graduate into laws, or at least become the genesis of laws. Artifically comingling different principles to support the bulk of a "theory"--such as comingling the law of "survival of the fitest" and the theory of "natural selection as origin of species"--is just bad science, regardless of the box you choose to put them in.
Example of the same principle in a different situation: arguing that Newton's Theory of Gravity and the rumors of rocks from the sky, or "meteors", are in opposition. Because, after all, any rock we've ever seen put into the sky falls down shortly thereafter.
Creationists say this like it means that it's somehow on shaky ground. It isn't.
Atheists say it as if there were no difference between the principle of evolution and the historic sequence of evolution. There is.
Specifically, we can test and observe and falsify evolution. It occurs in rats, and bunnies, and fruit flies. And humans, apparantly.
Calling the principle of evolution a theory is simply wrong. It's a basic biological fact, as far past theory as Newton's Laws. (We're also slowly approaching the time when we should call Relativity a law. It's not there yet, but it will be eventually.)
Now, since we don't have a time machine, we CANNOT falsify historical evolution. It's just a theory, and absent a time machine we won't ever be able to test it.
Muddying the water between historical and ongoing evolution is responsible for, if not most, then all of the conflict between Creationism and Atheist-evolution. Kindly stop doing it.
Apparently you didn't notice, but I feel that I have to inform you that communism didn't actually work out...
Rebuttal 1: Communist China is driving oil prices to current records. Communist USSR died due to internal social upheval, and despite horrid ineffeciences and far less natural resources and hardly the same infrastructure head start still went mono-a-mono with the USA for over fifty years. So saying it "didn't actually work out" is kind of short-sighted.
Rebuttal 2: Communism is bad because it's a direct violation of the right to a fair share of the profit from your labor. Without an impetus to be more effeicient and profitable, people generally don't bother.
Rebuttal 3: SCOTUS agrees with me about property rights. They're not absolute, or else eminent domain wouldn't exist.
Cracking DivX's single play DVD is not illegal under contract law, as no purchaser of that ever signed a contract, and we didn't have this soon-to-be-reversed and brain-dead legal ruling asserting that words on a box form a contract.
Sheesh. Go read some contract law.
You form contracts that are bound by and interpreted against contract law every time you make a purchase or agree to perform some act. Your signature on a piece of paper only makes it easier for the other side to prove you agreed to the contract.
A fat lot of fucking good that'll do you when every $400 box has a legal bomb in it, which will happen very, very soon if that's the only strategy we try to oppose it!
You're right. But the "other strategy" isn't to try and break the law.
The other strategy is to get other people to agree with you, and also not buy $400 legal bombs. Based on past peformance of Free Software advocates, however, I don't think that's likely to be successful.
An alternate strategy, btw, is to rely on the courts to force "them" to follow the letter of the agreement. Never agree to "these terms might be revised without notice". Always read the contract. Always object to an unreasonable clause. And alwyas, always, ALWAYS make clear what you want to do with the thing you buy.
(And, to respond to a latter comment, it's called "Trusted Computing" not because YOU can trust it, but because THEY can trust it. They trusted us once, and then Napster happened.)
It is perfectly legal for, say, DivX (The original) to sell DVDs that can only operate X times, and sue people under the DMCA who crack that.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with the doctrine of first sale. The limited number of plays is part of the bargin that DivX made, and so long as the bargain is public to any reasonable person, it's not the court's place to keep you from making a bad deal.
A comparable aspect is NDAs. Let's say that you're asked to consult on JK Rowlings's 8th book, Harry Potter and the Linux Geek. Rowling sends you a copy of her script, and an NDA. Even if you never recieve another dime and never give her any advice, she can (and probably will) take you to court when you sell your NDA's copy three weeks before the book is released.
Likewise, it is pefectly legal for Lexmark to make 'a copyrighted work' that only functions for X times, or X days, or as until the cartridge is empties the first time, and sue people who crack it.
Except that a printer cartridge isn't a copyrighted work. Patents cover physical things, and the theoretical printer cartridge isn't even being copied at all.
The courts will throw out an argume like that because Lexmark's printer cartridges are protected by PATENTS, not copyrights.
no manufacturer has the right to prevent lawful use of products, period. lawful being that you paid for the copy. after that, they have no say. but digitial technology unjustly gives them that power. and when that fails, they have their puppets in congress.
Please, please, PLEASE go back to high school. If you're already there, go find whomever teaches about the government and ask them to give you a remedial lesson.
And if that doesn't work, spend $400 and take a Survey of American Law class.
Yes, the manufacturers don't have a right to stop you from doing something on the box you bought from them. You can go right ahead and do it, and there isn't a lot they can do about it except stop doing business with you.
However, this does NOT mean that they have some sort of duty to let you do whatever you want. They can put in whatever encryption, phone-home schemes, arbitrary clauses in the sales contract, or ham sandwhiches they want to into the machine. And if they make it clear before the sale that they've done so, then you won't even be able to force them to return your money when it doesn't work as you expect.
Sheesh. And I won't even start on that remark about Copyright.
before you rush headlong to tell me "it's their business model"... i'll have to tell you how their business model is of any concern to me.
From the breadth, lack of capitalization, and general content of your rant, I'll presume that you believe in Free Software. (You could just be arguing by coincidence, but then that's your fault.)
It's YOUR business how they intend to make money, because you want to be using their chips. If you want them to change to fit how you think the world should work, you need to understand them and know where and how to argue.
And "property rights" aren't exactly basic rights. They're second-tier rights useful only becasue they perserve certain first tier rights--namely, liberty and the right to a fair share of the profit from your labor.
Remember that "property rights" were used throughout our nation's history for distasteful racism. It's not an argument that has a lot of leg left in it.
(And let's not forget that the best answer to a company that sells you a $400 box with a legal bomb in it is to just buy somebody else's $400 box.)
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People can start to control their eating habits and get benefits without consulting a doctor.
Not the sort of people who need to be told to control their eating habits, though. The same reactionary mind that looks at power lines too far away to detect without eyes or a camera as a threat will take an advice to "eat less meat and more vegetables" as a reason to toss their (and their family's) perfectly healthy balanced diet and become never-cooking vegans.
You're right, though. There are other folk who can advise you on making a healthy diet. The FDA is probably a good place to start, and absent them a licensed dietician or even a grocer or high school health teacher.
4GB just isn't very much space these days.
4 GB is half the size of some folk's entire hard drive. It should be more than enough to back up your entire OS, possibly your entire "bin" directory if you keep your PC neat.
But you're right. A more serious/lazy/gadget-happy geek would be better served buying either a 200 GB portable HDD or a tape backup system in addition to the DVD burner. Both of the previous have the problem in that they simply don't work for offline data archival--it's not their intended purpose.
7. Trade the VW Beetle (or other bad-in-a-crash car) for a Volvo (or other good-safety-record-for-its-driver vehicle).
/.
Ok, where exactly did you here that the Beetle is bad in a crash? Since when is Four stars considered "bad"?
And let's not forget that (1) crash avoidance is more important than trying to be a "bubble", and if we're going to toss around marketroid allegations as truth I'd rather a distinctive (i.e., visible) beetle over a "safe" volvo, or (2) the more important measure of a "by the numbers" car is (fuel and non-fuel) economy, and both cars have a fair bit of credibility in that status. (To say nothing of the rather significant non-fuel economies you get with a slightly used or american-made car.)
Anyway...
This is the Ask Slashdot section. It's where someone asks a question, and they get an answer. In fact, this is a great question for Ask Slashdot, because there were already two great responses ("build a faraday cage" and "get a meter to test") already. It's the equivalent of a "letters to the editor" page, if you really want to stretch a newspaper paradigm to fit
(And I'd change your "eat less meat / more vegetables" to a much more intelligent "see your doctor, ask him for diet advice, and follow it" line. Eating no meat and nothing but raw vegtebles is bad for you in entirely different ways than the inverse, but it's still bad for you.)
Your solution is to move things off of a hard drive. Correct. But you don't need a long-term professional solution--especially not when there's a long-term (or, if you want to be anal, medium-term) archival technology already tasked for the home.
Spend $100 and get yourself a DVD burner. Don't just use it for backup, but actually move things that you don't reference all the time--ESPECIALLY those ISOs you almost certainly don't need live--off of the live storage. For things that are important / irreplacable, make several copies. Distribute them far and wide to friends and family if you want.
So, MS doesn't like it. We all knew that.
But the parents said he'd "never" seen a company do well by cooperating with Microsoft. I named two.
Either way, though, this marks the end of Palm. I've never seen a company thats managed to 'cooperate' and 'codevelop' with MS without getting really messed
Apple: One of the Mac's biggest and most popular software programs is Microsoft Office. MS even went so far as to bail out Apple in the mid 1990s.
Adobe: Ever notice how Adobe works so well with MS Office? Indesign reads DOCs, Acrobat installs a custom Office PDF writer, etc. All due to cooperation between the two giants.
Essentially Palm is going down (stock wise and tech wise). With Linux Zaurses becoming popular and new products like the Nokia 770 coming out, there's not much room between Linux and WinCE for Palm to build a niche market.
You speak as if the next Palm OS wasn't already going to be linux.
Rumors about a WinCE Treo have been flying around for months. Rumors about a "windows Palm" have been even longer-lived. And, you know what? It isn't going to do jack against PalmOS. All it does it let a very well-designed device (the Treo) compete in just another area.
In the last few months I did my biannual palm upgrade. In two years, when I expect to do it again, the devices will have a Linux core, and they will have the Palm UI. WindowsCE (or whatever the heck the call it) will likely be an option, just as it would be an option to install Windows Vista or Linux on my 2007 iBook.
So which is it?
Both. If you want, substitute "meme" or "change" for "idea."
I'm not surprised at all to learn that there was on-the-fly spell checking far earlier than 1995. It doesn't do a thing to counter my point though, because for some reason neither WordStar nor Wordperfect nor any major other word-processor adopted it until MS did.
I started with Z-DOS (Zenith) which was a licenced version of MS-DOS 1.0 built for the Z100. I read computer rags, etc. I KNOW that much of the stuff attributed to MS actually was pioneered elsewhere, as I watched the whole PC industry unfold. But you cannot convince anyone of that.
Here's the rub--it doesn't matter who came up with the idea first. It matters who adopted it first. Of all the industry players who made office software, Microsoft was the one who was least scared of change--and, thus, they're the one left standing today.
Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Remember that "innovation" and "invention" are not synonyms.
OOo has a few rather interesting features that MS Office doesn't. Word-prediction, XML file formats (that is, "really small files you can actually open and muck around in if you want to"), and a better mix of "help" and "let you do it." Not to mention more than a few I'm just thinking of at 8:30 am.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
That would be Microsoft. Most new ideas in these areas in the last few years are a result of Microsoft taking them up. On-the-fly spell checking? MS Office. Thinking that office programs should export HTML? MS Office. One of the reasons why they break so many standards is that they're always looking for a new whiz-bang feature to get folk to upgrade their office suite. (And yes, a good portion of these ideas were thought up by someone else first. Just like someone else invented the telephone before Bell.)
The new Office has some interesting bits in it--but you are right, and there is a heck of a lot of room for improvement.
Social problems tend to require social solutions
But only when they are problems that you should be solving. A problem you can't or shouldn't solve isn't a problem, it's an 'issue.'
And any good system should be able to work around its issues.
Others that most of the users think will be tough to convert will actually convert quite well, because 99% of Word users do not use styles, really know much about using fieldcodes or embed/link to parts of other Office documents via OLE...
Field Codes, OLE, and the like aren't the hard parts. WPDs latter than the version MS thinks it supports, ten-hour-single-page documents (that are just filled with crap formatting), and the like are what really throws it.
And styles--boy, users using custom styles is the LEAST difficult hiccup to deal with!
As for #2 being a red herring--the changes in a version upgrade of office are negilgble between the difference betwixt two unfriendly office software packages.
(And as for your MDB rule of thumb--the correct first question is "What data?" Glorified address books don't need a full server DB, for example. There are others.)
Just because you have "nuclear capabilities" does not mean that you possess the capability needed to wipe out the US.
You seem to misunderstand the threat.
The only way to protect ALL of the United States is to, well, value all of it. Any country that sends a nuclear attack against the United States--possibly even little mini-USAs, such as an embassy or overseas base--is likely to suffer an inkind-plus-n reprisal.
This is YAD, not MAD. As in, "Your Assured Destruction." Watch as North Korea tries to start WWIII, and only succeeds in becoming the next Hiroshima.
Sheesh.
1: Microsoft Word can do much the same thing. No, really. Go to a place with a bunch of files that MS can open, install the latest version of Office, and look in the templates & wizards.
2: The price of conversion is in the checking. It's trivial to convert a file from one format to another. It's non-trivial to check both files to ensure that no information was lost.
Anyone who has watched one episode too many of those bad or mediocre TV shows and movies churned out by the industrial machine, at one time or another, must have thought that the home movies made by his cousin, as amateurish as they are, still beat those glossy images produced by a group of people who are in it for the money.
Here's the big secret that all of us whiney creative-but-poor types don't like to point out.
Most of the big talent in hollywood was a crappy kid with a videocamera once too. And the big ones are still there because, well, they make things worth watching.
Sheesh. Yes, 90% of TV is crap. 90% of everything is crap. But that 10% is certainly worth paying for--it's just a matter of price.
Evolution has nothing to do with atheism
Which is kind of like saying that intelligent design has nothing to do with Christianity.
Both statements are technically correct and practically wrong. Christians are among the proponents of intelligent design (and among its detractors, too--there are a hell of a lot of us).
And while there are doubtless a few Atheists among the ID proponents, Atheism as a movement (such as it is) is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. What's wrong is that numerous atheists, in their way of preaching without admiting that they're preacing, comingle both halves of the Theory of Evolution and oppose any attempt to rationally seperate them.
A dramatic minority of religions in the world have a problem with the idea that life evolves. Most have no problems at all with the idea that cats and dogs might one day walk around and talk in English, or that they might someday become one single species we'd call "Pet" or four species we could call "do", "dg", "ca", and "ct".
But most religions have a problem when science tries to tell them that Brhama did not create the world, that God did not shape the heavens and the earth, or that Goddess did not give brith to all living things. And they're quite right to.
All true agnostics are atheists and so was Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russell coined the term "agnostic" because he was sick to death of Atheists who treated Atheism as a religion of no God. And so, the language evolved, and the lower-a atheists ceeded the anti-theism word to the capital-A Atheists.
You of course are free to use whatever terms you wish. But the common usage does force a meaning upon "Atheism" of "the belief that there is no God and no group of lesser gods."
the notion of facts and truths don't have a place in science
Science is all about finding truths and facts!
Science is all about finding truths and facts!
Science is all about finding truths and facts!
It's the whole point of the scientific method--to seperate what we Know from what we Think. Yes, we have to Think it before we can Know it, and so Theory is a vital part of Science--but thinking that we can never and will never move Theories to Laws is just bad science.
Bad science of a kind, btw, that WILL turn science into Atheism. Thankfully, scientists are bright folk, and by and large can seperate the two.
Of course:
give me agnosticism any day.
Exactly right. Spot-on. Yay!
The only religion that science should be even commenting on is secular agnosticism. We *don't* know if a burning bush spoke to Moses thousands of years ago or not. We don't even know what I had for breakfast on this day ten years ago.
Those of us of whatever religon should not be trying to use Science to disprove other religions. And a fair portion of capital-A atheists *do* try and do just that. The bastards.
theories don't graduate into laws
Kindly name me a theory from Newton's time that is still a theory.
Theories DO graduate into laws, or at least become the genesis of laws. Artifically comingling different principles to support the bulk of a "theory"--such as comingling the law of "survival of the fitest" and the theory of "natural selection as origin of species"--is just bad science, regardless of the box you choose to put them in.
Example of the same principle in a different situation: arguing that Newton's Theory of Gravity and the rumors of rocks from the sky, or "meteors", are in opposition. Because, after all, any rock we've ever seen put into the sky falls down shortly thereafter.
Creationists say this like it means that it's somehow on shaky ground. It isn't.
Atheists say it as if there were no difference between the principle of evolution and the historic sequence of evolution. There is.
Specifically, we can test and observe and falsify evolution. It occurs in rats, and bunnies, and fruit flies. And humans, apparantly.
Calling the principle of evolution a theory is simply wrong. It's a basic biological fact, as far past theory as Newton's Laws. (We're also slowly approaching the time when we should call Relativity a law. It's not there yet, but it will be eventually.)
Now, since we don't have a time machine, we CANNOT falsify historical evolution. It's just a theory, and absent a time machine we won't ever be able to test it.
Muddying the water between historical and ongoing evolution is responsible for, if not most, then all of the conflict between Creationism and Atheist-evolution. Kindly stop doing it.
Apparently you didn't notice, but I feel that I have to inform you that communism didn't actually work out...
Rebuttal 1: Communist China is driving oil prices to current records. Communist USSR died due to internal social upheval, and despite horrid ineffeciences and far less natural resources and hardly the same infrastructure head start still went mono-a-mono with the USA for over fifty years. So saying it "didn't actually work out" is kind of short-sighted.
Rebuttal 2: Communism is bad because it's a direct violation of the right to a fair share of the profit from your labor. Without an impetus to be more effeicient and profitable, people generally don't bother.
Rebuttal 3: SCOTUS agrees with me about property rights. They're not absolute, or else eminent domain wouldn't exist.
Cracking DivX's single play DVD is not illegal under contract law, as no purchaser of that ever signed a contract, and we didn't have this soon-to-be-reversed and brain-dead legal ruling asserting that words on a box form a contract.
Sheesh. Go read some contract law.
You form contracts that are bound by and interpreted against contract law every time you make a purchase or agree to perform some act. Your signature on a piece of paper only makes it easier for the other side to prove you agreed to the contract.
A fat lot of fucking good that'll do you when every $400 box has a legal bomb in it, which will happen very, very soon if that's the only strategy we try to oppose it!
You're right. But the "other strategy" isn't to try and break the law.
The other strategy is to get other people to agree with you, and also not buy $400 legal bombs. Based on past peformance of Free Software advocates, however, I don't think that's likely to be successful.
An alternate strategy, btw, is to rely on the courts to force "them" to follow the letter of the agreement. Never agree to "these terms might be revised without notice". Always read the contract. Always object to an unreasonable clause. And alwyas, always, ALWAYS make clear what you want to do with the thing you buy.
(And, to respond to a latter comment, it's called "Trusted Computing" not because YOU can trust it, but because THEY can trust it. They trusted us once, and then Napster happened.)
It is perfectly legal for, say, DivX (The original) to sell DVDs that can only operate X times, and sue people under the DMCA who crack that.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with the doctrine of first sale. The limited number of plays is part of the bargin that DivX made, and so long as the bargain is public to any reasonable person, it's not the court's place to keep you from making a bad deal.
A comparable aspect is NDAs. Let's say that you're asked to consult on JK Rowlings's 8th book, Harry Potter and the Linux Geek. Rowling sends you a copy of her script, and an NDA. Even if you never recieve another dime and never give her any advice, she can (and probably will) take you to court when you sell your NDA's copy three weeks before the book is released.
Likewise, it is pefectly legal for Lexmark to make 'a copyrighted work' that only functions for X times, or X days, or as until the cartridge is empties the first time, and sue people who crack it.
Except that a printer cartridge isn't a copyrighted work. Patents cover physical things, and the theoretical printer cartridge isn't even being copied at all.
The courts will throw out an argume like that because Lexmark's printer cartridges are protected by PATENTS, not copyrights.
no manufacturer has the right to prevent lawful use of products, period. lawful being that you paid for the copy. after that, they have no say. but digitial technology unjustly gives them that power. and when that fails, they have their puppets in congress.
Please, please, PLEASE go back to high school. If you're already there, go find whomever teaches about the government and ask them to give you a remedial lesson.
And if that doesn't work, spend $400 and take a Survey of American Law class.
Yes, the manufacturers don't have a right to stop you from doing something on the box you bought from them. You can go right ahead and do it, and there isn't a lot they can do about it except stop doing business with you.
However, this does NOT mean that they have some sort of duty to let you do whatever you want. They can put in whatever encryption, phone-home schemes, arbitrary clauses in the sales contract, or ham sandwhiches they want to into the machine. And if they make it clear before the sale that they've done so, then you won't even be able to force them to return your money when it doesn't work as you expect.
Sheesh. And I won't even start on that remark about Copyright.
before you rush headlong to tell me "it's their business model"... i'll have to tell you how their business model is of any concern to me.
From the breadth, lack of capitalization, and general content of your rant, I'll presume that you believe in Free Software. (You could just be arguing by coincidence, but then that's your fault.)
It's YOUR business how they intend to make money, because you want to be using their chips. If you want them to change to fit how you think the world should work, you need to understand them and know where and how to argue.
And "property rights" aren't exactly basic rights. They're second-tier rights useful only becasue they perserve certain first tier rights--namely, liberty and the right to a fair share of the profit from your labor.
Remember that "property rights" were used throughout our nation's history for distasteful racism. It's not an argument that has a lot of leg left in it.
(And let's not forget that the best answer to a company that sells you a $400 box with a legal bomb in it is to just buy somebody else's $400 box.)